Yvette Cooper: border control weakening 'linked to job losses'

The shadow home secretary suggests that Theresa May's "astonishing"
decision to relax controls on people entering the UK may be linked to 6,500
job cuts being made at the border agency.

4:26PM GMT 08 Nov 2011

Yvette Cooper described Theresa May's decision to introduce a pilot scheme that subsquently led to a relaxation of border controls at UK ports as "shocking".

Mrs Cooper then demanded that the Home Secretary reveal whether the scheme was devised in response to job losses at the border agency.

Since October 2010, 2,300 jobs (around 10 per cent of the workforce) have been cut from the agency, with another 3,000 planned to go by 2014/15 according to the Public Commercial and Services union.

The shadow home secretary put the total number higher: "We know that the borders agency is losing 6,500 staff and there is some suggestion now that these reductions in border checks were decided after consideration of the impact that the cuts would have, the Home Secretary needs to tell us if that is the case."

She also attacked her government counterpart for not relaying news of the trial arrangement to ministerial colleagues.

"I think it is astonishing to have something that looks like such a major shift in policy towards borders not be commuicated to the cabinet, or to the prime minister, when it seems to reverse an agreement everybody had understood 'we should be strengthening our border checks, not weakening them'." Mrs Cooper said.

Her comments came after the Home Secretary insisted that she never authorised border officials to water down checks at ports which may have allowed terrorist suspects or foreign criminals into the country.

Theresa May told the Home Affairs Select Committee that ministers had earlier approved a pilot project which allowed less rigorous checks on Britons and other EU nationals.

However, senior UK border force officials “chose to go beyond” the limitations of the pilot by scrapping key checks against a Home Office database without ministerial approval, she told MPs.